Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan

More than half of America’s waterbodies are unsafe for swimming, fishing, and as sources of drinking due to city building and farming. Beyond water quality problems, dysfunctional streams cause flooding and erosion of property leading to neighborhood blight. Not only can this be reversed, but repair of degraded urban streams can be a powerful agent for reinventing the physical environments of post-industrial cities. This requires trans-disciplinary collaboration between the fields of ecological engineering and urban design. The American city was uniquely premised on fusions of landscape and urbanism―a tradition with plenty of room for innovation. However, watershed plans remain data and policy-driven documents with a singular interest in repairing waterbodies. They have little to say about the city and urban design. Conversely, urban planning has not codified the value of healthy ecosystems within which cities are built. In this age of the Anthropocene, when ecosystems are human-domina